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Carven

adjective
1.
Made for or formed by carving ('carven' is archaic or literary).  Synonym: carved.  "An intricately carved door" , "Stood as if carven from stone"






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Carven" Quotes from Famous Books



... Carven ivory have I none; No golden cornice in my dwelling shines; Pillars choice of Libyan stone Upbear no architrave from Attic mines; 'Twas not mine to enter in To Attalus' broad realms, an unknown heir, Nor for me fair clients spin Laconian purples for their patron's wear. ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace

... rung to the tread of the king's soldiers, who, disappointed in their search for hidden goods, consented to take a drink at their host's expense, little recking that, but a few feet away, behind the carven chimneypiece upon which they doubtless set down their glasses, there lay heaps and heaps of the richest goods, only awaiting their own departure to be scattered through the length ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green

... were unpopular with those in power, and the mob openly rejoiced when goods were levied upon. Indeed many of the poorer and plainer brethren had little sympathy when such articles as "a looking glass in wide gilt and mahogany frame, with ornamental corners" and "handsome walnut chairs deeply carven and with silken cushions" and "mahogany tea table with carved legs and crow feet" were sold for a quarter of their value. It shows that many of the Friends were not stinted in their household appointments, and must indeed have had ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas

... seemed like a rare flower blossoming in the dark. A single light, in a silver lamp hung by a silver chain, burnt before the altar; all else was dim; but they could see the dark stalls of the choir, with their carven canopies, over which hung the banners of old knights, that moved softly to and fro; beyond were the pillars of the aisles, glimmering faintly in a row. The roof and windows were dark, save where here and there a rib of stone ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson

... have been carven for all the truth that Jenny got from it then. There darted across her mind the chauffeur's certainty that she was to be his passenger. She took another ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton

... around my wrists long ropes of coral and of jade, And beaten gold that clung like coils of kisses love-inlaid; About my naked ankles tawny topaz chains you wound, With clasps of carven ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson

... piteous wise She lifted up her look to ask, Except the ever-burning eyes His face was like a marble mask. And so it always meets her now; The tomb wherein at last he lies Shall bear such carven lips and brow, ...
— Ride to the Lady • Helen Gray Cone

... looking at the dark old beauty of the Broodhuis, or at the wondrous carven fronts of other Spanish houses, or at the painted stories of the cathedral windows, or at the quaint colors of the shipping on the quay, or at the long dark aisles of trees that went away through the forest, where her steps had never wandered,—sometimes Bebee would get pondering on ...
— Bebee • Ouida

... north and south three hundred feet in either direction from the base of the great tower; he would note the artistry of the iron-braced, oaken doors, flanked at the lintels by inscrutable faces of carven stone, of the windows with their diamonded panes of milky glass peeping through a wilderness of encroaching vines. Nor would this be all. Had he ever viewed the quadrangles of Oxford and Cambridge, he might be able to infer that here, on this sunny plateau above the ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins

... Theseus made, a mile in circuit, and walled with stone. Eastward and westward were marble gates, whereon were built temples of Venus and Mars, while in a turret on the north wall was a shrine of Diana goddess of chastity. And each temple was nobly carven and wrought with ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick

... than visible: 'How great Was he, our Founder! In that ample brow, What brooding weight of genius! In his eye, How strangely was the pathos edged with light! How oft, his churches roaming, flashed its beam From pillar on to pillar, resting long On carven imagery of flower or fruit, Or deep-dyed window whence the heavenly choirs Gave joy to men below! With what a zeal He drew the cunningest craftsmen from all climes To express his thoughts in form; while yet his hand, Like meanest hand among us, patient toiled In garden ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere

... Hamelin.—The PIPER, alone, stands spell-bound, breathing hard, and looking after her. Then he turns his head and comes down, doggedly. Again he pauses. With a sudden sharp effort he turns, and crosses with passionate appeal to the shrine, his arm uplifted towards the carven Christ as if he warded off some accusation. His speech comes in ...
— The Piper • Josephine Preston Peabody

... not suffer slights of men, And pangs of hopeless passion also, To have his carven agate-stone On such a bosom ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various

... slightest interest and moment. Indeed, this was hardly to be wondered at; for the priest, so far as I could understand his gabble, took the larger portion for read, after muttering the first words of the rubric. A little carven image of an acolyte—a weird boy who seemed to move by springs, whose hair had all the semblance of painted wood, and whose complexion was white and red like a clown's—did not make matters more ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds

... down the ear-trumpet, and afterwards wipes it very carefully with his handkerchief. MANSON stands, as though carven in marble, waiting for him to ...
— The Servant in the House • Charles Rann Kennedy

... and the lady had to bow her head full low, and even then the gold brocade caught in one of the long slim gold flowers that were wrought round about the crown she wore. She flushed up in her rage, and her smooth face went suddenly into the carven wrinkles of a wooden water-spout, and she caught at the brocade with her left hand, and pulled it away furiously, so that the warp and woof were twisted out of their place, and many gold threads ...
— The Hollow Land • William Morris

... threshold the eye of fancy may see the ghosts of monks and the shadows of abbots pass noiselessly to and fro? What is a paltry piazza to a beautiful ambulatory of the thirteenth century—a long stone gallery or cloister repeated in two stories, with the interstices of its carven lattice now glazed, but with its long, low, narrow, charming vista still perfect and picturesque—with its flags worn away by monkish sandals, and with huge round-arched doorways opening from its inner side into great rooms roofed like cathedrals? What are the longest French windows, with ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various

... the orchard, near the dusty highway, under a huge misshapen olive tree sat a boy, still as a carven Buddha save that his eyes stood wide, full of dreams. His was a sensitive face, thoughtful beyond his childish years, full of weariness when from time to time he closed his eyes, full of dark brooding when the lids lifted again. Presently he rose to his ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... been the shoes of one who lay here, a princess, dead thousands of years, and once very beautiful, as these carven symbols told. They were small and dainty and threaded with fine gold, and laced across with care about the feet of her who was once a woman and a princess and owner of much beauty, and who was in her life beloved, and in her death mourned; as these graven symbols said. A thousand years this love ...
— The Singing Mouse Stories • Emerson Hough

... knelt, while Reginald Sawyer, having mounted into the pulpit, read the invocation; mechanically rose from her knees with the rest, and disposed herself in the inner corner of the pew, sitting sideways so that her left hand might rest upon the carven marble margin of the tomb. She liked touch of it still, in the quietude of her great content, cherishing a pretty fancy of the knight and his lady's sympathy and that also of ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet

... silver hem. And the hart with its splendid antlers stood motionless and proud as though it knew it carried a young Queen. But indeed men wondered whether it were not a young goddess. And so for a very few moments this carven vision of gold and silver and ivory and molten bronze and copper and green jewels stood in their gaze. And then Harding bore the crown to her and knelt, and stood up again and crowned her before them all; and laying his hand upon the white hart's neck, moved away with it and its beautiful rider ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon

... forth the minster to knowen And awayted a wone wonderly well y-built, With arches on every hall & belliche [beautifully] y-carven With crochets on corners, with knots of gold, Wide windows y-wrought, y-written full thick, Shyning with shapen shields to shewen about, With marks of merchants y-meddled between, Mo than twenty and two, twice y-numbered; There is none herald that hath half such a roll, ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell

... carried Fanie in with his clothes all draggled and his beard full of mud. They laid him on the table, and I saw his face. . . . Dear God! . . There was terror on that face, carven and set in dead flesh, that set my blood screaming in my body. Sometimes even now I wake in the night all shrinking with fear of the ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon

... can also be as slow as the wrath of Heaven. And that bird there, the great, grand, haughty, unbending Aquila chrysoetus, that golden eagle, sat. I say, he sat. And there, so far as he was concerned, appeared to be an end of it. He might have been a carven copestone of the very granite fang he sat upon, for all the appearance of life he gave, except that occasionally—say at fifteen-minute intervals—he winked a yellow-lidded wink. And the wink was almost as unlifelike and ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars

... gift and looked it over with real admiration. It was a flimsily beautiful and costly thing; whose ivory handle was deftly carven and set with several uncut stones; and whose deep fringe of lace was true ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune

... and lord of all lands near by, commanded for the closer knowledge of the gods that Their images should be carven in Runazar, and in all lands near by. And when Althazar's command, wafted abroad by trumpets, came tinkling in the ear of all the gods, right glad were They at the sound of it. Therefore men quarried marble from the earth, and sculptors busied themselves ...
— Time and the Gods • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]

... figures down the road presented themselves like two rigid and wooden silhouettes all black on the ribbon of white dust. General D'Hubert made out the long, straight, military capotes buttoned closely right up to the black stocks, the cocked hats, the lean, carven, brown countenances—old soldiers—vieilles moustaches! The taller of the two had a black patch over one eye; the other's hard, dry countenance presented some bizarre, disquieting peculiarity, which on nearer approach proved to be the absence of the ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad

... Scottismore, Roger Kid, Nicholas Bullington, Nicholas Marttin, John Carter, Christopher Hall, David Ellis, uxor Ellis, John Frogmorton, Robert Marshall, Thomas Snow (orig. Swnow), John Smith, Lawrance Smalpage, Thomas Crosse, Thomas Prichard, Richard Crouch, Christopher Redhead, Henry Booth, Richard Carven, uxor Carven, John Howell, William Burtt, William Stocker, Nicholas Roote, Sara Kiddall, infants { Kiddall, { Kiddall, Edward Fisher, Richard Smith, John Wolrich, Mrs. Wolrich, Johathin Giles, Christopher ...
— Colonial Records of Virginia • Various

... quaintly carven, With oaken arms outspread, Whereby, in the long gone twilights, His childish ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various

... shone over her winding-sheet, There stark she lay on her carven bed: Seven burning tapers about her feet, And seven about ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various

... pillars, shrines, and statues; there are stairs, monuments, and restaurants; there is a ballroom three hundred feet long and one hundred and ninety feet high, with beautiful chandeliers, and in it is a carven throne whereon the Emperor Franz Joseph sat when he visited the mine. There are lakes crossed by ferryboats. There is a railroad station for the mule trains which bear the precious mineral salt, for this is a salt mine, and shrines, statues, churches, chandeliers—everything—are ...
— Diggers in the Earth • Eva March Tappan

... that was blazoned like a missal-book, Black with oaken gables, carven and inscrolled; Every street a colored page, every sign a hieroglyph, Dusky with enchantments, ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck

... pressed against the hollow of her arm, from which the loose red sleeve had slipped back to above the elbow. Under his passionate words Arithelli sat like a being entranced, unseeing, unhearing. The inscrutable eyes set in the rigid face gave her the likeness to some carven thing. ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward

... tossed on the sacred fire below him,—and a flame awoke for a moment, the eyes reflected the light in a startling way—as though alive! Then the strangers saw that the eyes were of iridescent shell set in the carven stone,—and more strange than all was the fact that the god of the altar was a weeping god, and the tear under each eye was also of the strange shell mosaic. It was the Earth-Born God who had been driven ...
— The Flute of the Gods • Marah Ellis Ryan

... watching in amazement as he saw it swing slowly up toward the advancing horde risen level with them in the air—up above their massed blackness of wings—on and up, until the tube was pointing toward the base of a carven pendant, whose blending colors were fairy ...
— The Finding of Haldgren • Charles Willard Diffin

... dignified, grand, but happy, was open on all sides to the sun and air. From it I could see tamarisk- and acacia-trees, and far-off shadowy mountains beyond the eastern verge of the Nile. And the trees were still as carven things in an atmosphere that was a miracle of clearness and of purity. Behind me, and near, the hard Libyan mountains gleamed in the sun. Somewhere a boy was singing; and suddenly his singing died away. And I thought of the "Lay of the Harper" which is inscribed ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens

... own apartments and his own privacy secure, this disposition to own has found its release in a new direction. Men study and save and strive that they may leave behind them a series of panels in some public arcade, a row of carven figures along a terrace, a grove, a pavilion. Or they give themselves to the penetration of some still opaque riddle in phenomena as once men gave themselves to the accumulation of riches. The work that was ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells

... arching neck was proudly raised, And lazulites beneath it blazed. With roseate bloom his flanks were dyed, And lotus tints adorned his hide. His shape was fair, compact, and slight; His hoofs were carven lazulite. His tail with every changing glow Displayed the hues of Indra's bow. With glossy skin so strangely flecked, With tints of every gem bedecked. A light o'er Rama's home he sent, And through the wood, where'er he went. The giant clad in that strange dress ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI

... carven couch in slumber lay the Lady Gwineth Grey, Traces of a smile yet lingering on a cheek of rosy May— On the softest velvet slumbering, in a mist of golden hair, Trembling on her heaving bosom, and along ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various

... she walks to the balustrade, Idly notes how the blossoms fade In the sun's caress; then crosses where The shadow shelters a carven chair. Within its curve, supine she lies, And wearily closes her tired eyes. The minstrel beseeches his silver strings, And holding the lady spellbound, sings: — Down the road to Avignon, The long, long road ...
— A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass • Amy Lowell

... men in the banquet-hall on bench assigned, sturdy-spirited, sat them down, hardy-hearted. A henchman attended, carried the carven cup in hand, served the clear mead. Oft minstrels sang blithe in Heorot. Heroes revelled, no dearth of ...
— Beowulf • Anonymous

... men, have you no blessing for the birds? Recall to your memory that, in their minor kind, the love poems of Dante shed no less honour on Catholicism than did the great religious poem which is itself pivoted on love; that in singing of heaven he sang of Beatrice—this supporting angel was still carven on his harp even when he stirred its strings in Paradise. What you theoretically know, vividly realise: that with many the religion of beauty must always be a passion and a power, that it is only evil when divorced from the ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson

... about it; so much that was beautiful, mysterious, full of repose and saintly influence. The far east end was lost in obscurity, and we could barely trace the outlines of the splendid roof. Far down, near a confessional, knelt a small group of hooded women, motionless as carven images. Their heads were bowed, their whole attitude betrayed the penitential mood. There might have been eight or ten at most, and they never stirred. But every now and then a fair penitent issued from ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 6, June, 1891 • Various

... his arm and looked at the two red sentinels. Not a muscle of either had stirred. They were so much carven bronze. Their rifles lay across their knees and they stared fixedly at the forest. But he knew that their eyes and ears were of the keenest and that but little could escape their attention. Yet they ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler

... whose art Is frail as a cassia-flower, is my heart, Carven with delicate dreams and wrought With many ...
— The Golden Threshold • Sarojini Naidu

... below it, were low carven stools. The curtains parted and softly entered girls bearing their flutes, their harps, the curiously emotion-exciting, octaved drums. They sank into their places. They touched their instruments; a faint, languorous measure ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt

... list. I cannot do more than attempt to describe—and that very briefly—a few of the typical old houses. On this same Pleasant Street there are several which we must leave unnoted, with their spacious halls and carven staircases, their antiquated furniture and old silver tankards and choice Copleys. Numerous examples of this artist's best manner are to be found here. To live in Portsmouth without possessing a family portrait done by Copley is like living in Boston without having an ancestor in ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... old gray walls, Soon the last stone will be gone, The olden church of the Recollects, We shall look no more upon; And though, perchance, some stately pile May rise its place to fill, With carven piers and lofty towers, Old Church, we shall miss ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon

... and quaintly carven balconies were noisy with shrill voices. Every self-respecting house was plastered with fresh mud; every window and doorway garlanded with marigold and jasmine buds; every brain, absorbed in the paramount ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver

... posts, as firmly planted by time as the avenue of live-oaks they headed, showed clearly in the afternoon light. And from the nearest, deep carven in the stone, a jagged-toothed skull, crowned and grinning, stared blankly at the three in the shabby car. Beneath it ran the insolent motto of an ancient and disreputable clan, "What ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton

... by love exalted, change to man indeed and I—mount up to heaven—thus!" So saying, Jocelyn began to climb by gnarled ivy and carven buttress. And ever as he mounted she watched him through the silken curtain of her hair, wide of eye and with ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol

... girls crossed the room, and with a caressing and almost a reverent touch, the dark girl opened the doors of a little carven cabinet that hung upon the wall, above a small table covered with a delicate white cloth. In its depths, framed in a mat of odorous double violets, stood the photograph of the face of a handsome man of forty—a face crowned with clustering black ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various

... the carven box which the shrieking oracle commended to me. "Take this," it said, "take this, and it will turn the blackness of exile ...
— Hypolympia - Or, The Gods in the Island, an Ironic Fantasy • Edmund Gosse

... but I have always imagined that even that carven image of an old aborigine must, have smiled a little ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield

... part of solemn ceremonies whereby good hunting is held to be secured. Something of the sort, then, we may suppose, took place ages ago in the cave of Niaux. So, indeed, it was a cathedral after a fashion; and, having in mind the carven pillars of stalactite, the curving alcoves and side-chapels, the shining white walls, and the dim ceiling that held in scorn our powerful lamps, I venture to question whether man has ever lifted up his heart in ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett

... for this House of God and Home of Man. The sculptors, who since the destruction of the Roman Empire have been out of employment, haltingly return to their noble art. Portals and pillars and buttresses and cornices are all covered with carven images of Our Lord and the blessed Saints. The embroiderers too are set to work to make tapestries for the walls. The jewellers offer their highest art that the shrine of the altar may be worthy of complete adoration. Even the painter does his best. Poor ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon

... was a statue or two of some indefinable white material, glistening like marble and yet so soft that it had been indented in several places by accidental pressure. There were fans of strangely-woven silk, with sticks of carven rock-crystal, and hand mirrors of polished copper set in frames of gems that he did not recognize. Upon the wall were mended bits of purple tapestry, embroidered or painted or woven in singular patterns of flora and birds that St. George could not name. There were rolls of parchment, and vases ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale

... that call thee "honey-pale." Yea, and the violet is swart, and swart the lettered hyacinth, but yet these flowers are chosen the first in garlands. . . . Ah, gracious Africa, thy feet are fashioned like carven ivory, thy voice is drowsy sweet, and thy ways, ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps

... matter if the Major did turn over to Sydney a third of it now. And George had a fragmentary vision of himself, in mourning, arriving to take possession of a historic Florentine villa—he saw himself walking up a cypress-bordered path, with ancient carven stone balustrades in the distance, and servants in mourning livery greeting the new signore. "Well, I suppose it's grandfather's own affair. He can do it or not, just as he likes. I don't see why he'd ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington

... same place like a carven woman. She waited for him with wide, harassed eyes. As he came to her she ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner

... carven stuff; Some sneer, but others smile and buy; And these light smiles are quite enough To make the ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)

... the entrance to the passage, that was impossible. It was easy enough to trace the entrance hall, but the carven beams of the roof had entirely gone, and there was not the slightest trace visible of the grand staircase or the corridor which ran to right and left. Smouldering ashes, calcined stone, and here and there the projecting charred stump of some beam; but no sign of a passage running between walls, ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn

... shawl over her head, she rolled the flowers in her apron from the frost, and stepped out into the brilliant day. The little cross-track between her house and the other was snowed up; but she took the road and, hurrying between banks of carven whiteness, went up Solon's path to the side door. She walked in upon him where he was standing over the kitchen stove, warming his hands at the first blaze. Susan's cheeks were red with the challenge of the stinging air, but she had the look of one who, living by a larger ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown

... house And all the blessed casks be knocked o' the head, HORRENDUM! all his Holiness' drink to be Profanely guzzled down the reeking throats Of scoundrels, and inflame them on to seize The massy coffers of the Church's gold, And steal, mayhap, the carven silver shrine And all the golden crucifixes? No! — And so the holy father Pope made stir And had sent forth a legate to Cervolles, And treated with him, and made compromise, And, last, had bidden all the Arch-priest's troop To come and banquet with him in his house, Where they did wassail high ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier

... chamber on Raleigh's arm, threaded numerous corridors, sumptuously curtained and carpeted, and came at last to a spacious room where, on a huge sideboard of carven oak, constant provision was maintained for bodily refreshment. Servants in royal livery stood about, and several gentlemen of the household, who had just been relieved from duty, or come in from running some royal errand, stood sipping a ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan

... day; and, to strengthen my argument on this point, he adds that, "these terms were so entirely foreign and alien from the common Hebrew language as to have driven the Ptolemaist authors of the Septuagint version into a blunder, by which the ivory, apes, and peacocks come out as 'hewn and carven stones.'" The circumstance adverted to had not escaped my notice; but I forebore to avail myself of it; for, although the fact is accurately stated by the reviewer, so far as regards the Vatican MS., in which the translators have slurred over ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent

... cameo face, carven in on a ground Of that shadowy hair where the roses are wound; And the gleam of a smile O as fair and as faint And as sweet as the masters of old used to paint Round the ...
— Riley Love-Lyrics • James Whitcomb Riley

... heart to beat And then didst hurry off and bear with thee All of the gladness thou once gavest me. 'Tis half my heart I lack through this thy taking And what is left is good for naught but aching. Stonecutters, set me up a carven stone And let this sad inscription run thereon: Ursula Kochanowski lieth here, Her father's sorrow and her father's dear; For heedless Death hath acted here crisscross: She should have mourned my death, ...
— Laments • Jan Kochanowski

... wuthering of the wind which had wakened her and about the faint far-off sounds of the complaining voice which had led her down the dark corridors with her candle and had ended with her opening of the door of the dimly lighted room with the carven four-posted bed in the corner. When she described the small ivory-white face and the strange black-rimmed eyes ...
— The Secret Garden • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... slender that one looked to see the occupant topple and fall from moment to moment. He was a brown-faced fellow of small stature and as lithe as an Indian, and he was juggling recklessly with a pair of grotesque carven sticks, ...
— Against Odds - A Detective Story • Lawrence L. Lynch

... height, or search Together with unparsimonious mind The crowded harbours of mortality. And there were jests, wholesome as harvest ale, Of homely habit, bred of hearts that dared Judgment of laughter under the eternal eye: This frolic wisdom was his carven owl. His ram was lordship on the lonely hills, Alert and fleet, content only to know The wind mightily pouring on his fleece, With yesterday and all unrisen suns Poorer than disinherited ghosts. His bat ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)

... and to accomplish by the etherization of excitement and the magnetism of crowds what is possible only in the solitary exaltations of the soul. This is the high moral of Dante's poem. We have likened it to a Christian basilica; and as in that so there is here also, painted or carven, every image of beauty and holiness the artist's mind could conceive for the adornment of the holy place. We may linger to enjoy these if we will, but if we follow the central thought that runs like the nave from entrance to choir, it leads us to an image of the divine made human, to ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell

... the smell of tar and the loading of the innumerable and fascinating materials of life; and many a journey they must have made on the calm waters of Cadiz harbour from ship to ship, dreaming of the distant seas that these high, quaintly carven prows would soon be treading, and the wonderful bays and harbours far away across the world into the waters of which their anchors were ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young

... and five in the morning, about when grandfather would be getting up by candle-light to start the kitchen fire for mother, and then go out and fodder the cattle. They'd be home in time to wake the three younger children (young Steve was the eldest of a family of four), and to add certain little carven products of the woodsman's whittling—ingenious wooden toys, and tiny elaborate boxes, filled with choicest globules of spruce gum—to the few poor Christmas gifts which the resourceful and busy little mother had managed to get together ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts

... admitted to an untidy room—that of a student, a traveler and a crank—by a plain-clothes officer. Amid picturesque and disordered fragments of a hundred ages, in a great carven chair placed before a towering statue of the Buddha, sat a hand-cuffed man. His white hair and beard were patriarchal; his pose had great dignity. But his expression was entirely masked by the smoked ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer

... stay. How beautiful are all things round about me, Multiplied by the mirrors on the walls! What treasures hast thou here! Yon oaken chest, Carven with figures and embossed with gold, Is wonderful to look upon! What choice And precious things dost thou keep hidden ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... show you Chinatown. To some the ivories will always be but crudely carven bone, the jades the potter's sham, the musk and aloes the product of a soap factory, the joss but a cigar-store Indian, and the Oriental dainties of Hong Fah the scrappings of a Yankee grocery store. Yet behind the shoddy tinsel of Doyers and Pell Streets, as behind Alice's ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train

... birds of the Lord With earth's waters make accord; Teach how the crucifix may be Carven from the laurel-tree, Fruit of the Hesperides Burnish take on Eden-trees, The Muses' sacred grove be wet With the red dew of Olivet, And Sappho lay her burning brows In ...
— Poems • Francis Thompson

... her little scarlet cloak from out the carven chest, and as Ezra came past the door, leading the little gray donkey, she flung it across her ...
— Christmas Light • Ethel Calvert Phillips

... and rings and carven gems, And the wise crawling sea; But most of all the crowns of kings, The rule they ...
— Young Adventure - A Book of Poems • Stephen Vincent Benet

... time forth he renounced a better world, and never uncovered himself when a Name was pronounced, and for him the carven saints in the churches became works of art. He understood the mechanism of society too well to clash wantonly with its prejudices; for, after all, he was not as powerful as the executioner, but he evaded social laws ...
— The Elixir of Life • Honore de Balzac

... and yet overpoweringly vivid. Now they widened into dark-shored pools splashed with sunset, now glittered and menaced like the shields of fighting angels. Some were cataracts of sapphires, others roses dropped from a saint's tunic, others great carven platters strewn with heavenly regalia, others the sails of galleons bound for the Purple Islands; and in the western wall the scattered fires of the rose-window hung like a constellation in an African night. When one dropped one's eyes form these ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton

... as full of thine heart and thy soul and as wise and deft as be thy wrists and thine hands, and their very fellows. Now as to thy face: under that smooth forehead is thy nose, which is of measure, neither small nor great, straight, and lovely carven at the nostrils: thine eyen are as grey as a hawk's, but kind and serious, and nothing fierce nor shifting. Nay, now thou lettest thine eyelids fall, it is as fair with thy face as if they were open, so smooth and ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris

... insolently obtrusive in such a stillness. Gherardi abstractedly raised his eyes to a great ivory crucifix which was displayed upon the wall against a background of rich purple velvet,—Manuel was standing immediately in front of it, and the tortured head of the carven Christ drooped over him as though in a sorrow-stricken benediction. A dull anger began to irritate Gherardi's usually well-tempered nerves, and he was searching in his mind for some scathing sentence wherewith to overwhelm and reprove the ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli

... Chapel, how divine The art that reared thy costly shrine! Thy carven columns must have grown By magic, like a dream ...
— Songs Out of Doors • Henry Van Dyke

... spake, and passed with staff and wallet forth Through the tall portal to the open square, And turning, paused to look upon the pile. The northern front against the crystal sky Loomed dark and heavy, full of sombre shade, With each projecting buttress, carven cross, Gable and mullion, tipped with laughing light By the slant sunbeams of the risen morn. The noisy swallows wheeled above their nests, Builded in hidden nooks about the porch. No human life was stirring in the square, Save now and ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus

... and lonely one, Who feared not dying: Gone in another's stead Alone to the hungry dead: Light be the carven ...
— Alcestis • Euripides

... illumines with splendour a silent chaos of granite, which is not that of the slipping of mountains, but that of ruins. And of such ruins as, to our eyes unaccustomed hereditarily to proportions so gigantic, seem superhuman. In places, huge masses of carven stone—pylons—still stand upright, rising like hills. Others are crumbling in all directions in bewildering cataracts of stone. It is difficult to conceive how these things, so massive that they might have seemed eternal, ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti

... robbed. And, too, these legends always held forth the hope that some day that nameless continent from which their race had sprung, would rise once more out of the sea and with slaves at the long sweeps would send her carven, gold-picked galleys forth to succor ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... two daughters.' And when the northern tribes got this invitation they flocked down the coast to this feast of a Great Peace. They brought their women and their children: they brought game and fish, gold and white stone beads, baskets and carven ladles, and wonderful woven blankets to lay at the feet of their now acknowledged ruler, the great Tyee. And he, in turn, gave such a potlatch that nothing but tradition can vie with it. There were long, glad days of joyousness, long pleasurable ...
— Legends of Vancouver • E. Pauline Johnson

... our great hall there stood a vacant chair, Fashion'd by Merlin ere he past away, And carven with strange figures; and in and out The figures, like a serpent, ran a scroll Of letters in a tongue no man could read And Merlin call'd it 'The Siege perilous,' Perilous for good and ill; 'for there,' he said, 'No man could sit but ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch

... gravely In its bulk the fabric stood, Even as Love, that trusteth bravely In its own exceeding good To be better than the waste Of time's devices; grandly spaced, Seriously the fabric stood. But over it all a pleasure went Of carven delicate ornament, Wreathing up like ravishment, Mentioning in sculptures twined The blitheness Love hath in his mind; And like delighted senses were The windows, and the columns there Made the following sight to ache As the heart that did ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie

... sent for, the great cobwebbed house was scrubbed and furbished in the living chambers, the ancient silver was exhumed from mildewed cupboards, the heavy oil-paintings were dusted, a lively canary in a bright cage was hung on a marble pillar of the dining-room, over the carven angels; flowers were brought in, and at night, in the soft light of the candles, the traces of year-long neglect being subdued and hidden, a spirit of festivity and gaiety pervaded the house as of ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... foe, wrought me trouble When targe upon targe I had carven: For the thin wand of slaughter was shattered And it sundered the ground of my handgrip. Loud bellowed the bear of the sea-king When he brake from his lair in the scabbard, At the hest of the singer, who seeketh The sweet hidden draught ...
— The Life and Death of Cormac the Skald • Unknown

... Time, In some diviner clime, In Fancy's tropic zone, Beneath its summer skies, Where all the live-long year the summer never dies! A stately marble pile whose pillars rise, From sculptured bases, fluted to the dome, With wreathed friezes crowned, all carven nice With pendant leaves, like ragged rims of foam; A thousand windows front the rising sun, Deep-set between the columns, many paned, Tri-arched, emblazoned, gorgeously stained, Crimson and purple, green and blue, and dun, And all their wedded colors ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various

... the white flame That was her soul once, whither has it flown? Above her brow gray lichens blot her name Upon the carven stone. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner

... about him. A seated figure of the Pharaoh Seti I. surveyed him with a scorn but thinly veiled; beyond, two towering Assyrian bulls showed gigantic in the semi-light. He could discern, now, the whole length of the lofty hall—a carven avenue; and, as his gaze wandered along that dim vista, he detected a black shape emerging from the blacker shadows beyond ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer

... is Abbey Asaroe, by Belashanny town, It has neither door nor window, the walls are broken down; The carven-stones lie scatter'd in briar and nettle-bed; The only feet are those that come at burial of the dead. A little rocky rivulet runs murmuring to the tide, Singing a song of ancient days, in sorrow, not in pride; The boortree and the lightsome ash ...
— Sixteen Poems • William Allingham

... dwarfed nodosities of pine, Mixed with old alphabets, and faded lore Fallen from ecstatic mouths before the Flood, Or gathered by the daughters when they walked Eastward in Eden with the Sons of God Whom love and the deep moon made garrulous. Between the carven tusks his trunk hung dead; Blind as the eyes of pearl in Buddha's brow His beaded eyes stared thwart upon the road; And feebler than the doting knees of eld, His joints, of size to swing the builder's crane Across the war-walls of the Anakim, Made vain ...
— Gloucester Moors and Other Poems • William Vaughn Moody

... Im Hexenlicht und Elfenschein Vhere blooty Druids omens trew From grin und screech of shaps dey slew; Or vhere der Norseman long of yore Vas carven eagles on de shore, As o'er him yell de Valkyr broot Und crows valk round knee teep im ploot, Vhile rabens schkreem o'er ruddy bay; Dere - ten pottles troonk - ...
— The Breitmann Ballads • Charles G. Leland

... was a tall, commodious, plastered mansion, framed in carven oak, and covered by a low-pitched roof of thatch. To the back there stretched a garden, full of fruit-trees, alleys, and thick arbours, and over-looked from the far end by the tower ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Madonna lilies flourished like sculpture about the porch, and he admired their tall stems and leaves and carven blossoms, thinking how they would die without strife, without complaint. The briar filled the air with a sweet, apple-like smell; and far away the lake shone in the moonlight, just as it had a thousand years ago when the raiders returned to their fortresses ...
— The Lake • George Moore

... vision unawares From the long alley's latticed shade Emerged, I came upon the great Pavilion of the Caliphat. Right to the carven cedarn doors, Flung inward over spangled floors, Broad-based flights of marble stairs Ran up with golden balustrade, After the fashion of the time, And humour of the golden prime Of ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson

... In solitude decays, With carven walls still hallowed With prayers of bygone days, Here, where the coral outcrops Make "flowers of the sea," The olden Peace yet lingers, ...
— Last Poems • Laurence Hope

... fool's talk," cried the archer; "for being a man of no learning myself, my tongue turns to blades and targets, even as my hand does. Know then that for every parchment in England there are twenty in France. For every statue, cut gem, shrine, carven screen, or what else might please the eye of a learned clerk, there are a good hundred to our one. At the spoiling of Carcasonne I have seen chambers stored with writing, though not one man in our Company could read them. Again, in Arles and Nimes, and other ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle

... shell unto his shell-like ear And there was music carven in his face, His eyes half-closed, his lips just breaking open To catch the lulling, mazy, coralline roar Of numberless ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various

... and waved her sceptre, whereon all the company bowed thrice, then turned and breaking into some sweet, low chant that sounded like a lullaby, marched, rank after rank, across the width of the Sanctuary and through the carven doors which closed behind the last ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard

... Sir Thomas Thumb; but the King and the Court were so sorry at the loss of their little favourite that they went into mourning for him. And they put a fine white marble monument over his grave whereon was carven ...
— English Fairy Tales • Flora Annie Steel

... feast went on, the guests practising their gluttonies and their absurdities, and the guards standing to their arms round the circuit of the walls as motionless and as stern as the statues carven in the white stone beyond them. But a term was put to the orgy with something of suddenness. There was a stir at the farther doorway of the banqueting-hall, and a clash, as two of the guards joined ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne

... grace' is by their aiding us to understand better and to feel more the truth as it is in Jesus, and to cleave closer to Him who is the truth. Do they enlighten the understanding? Do they engrave deeper the loved face carven on the tablets of memory, which the attrition of worldly cares is ever obliterating, and the lichens of worldly thoughts ever filling up? Do they clear out the rubbish from the channels of the heart, that the cleansing stream may flow ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... for a moment, he quiet as a carven statue and I restless but obedient to his wishes. When he stirred I carefully lit the candles, but I did not look at him till he had donned his cloak and pulled his hat well over his eyes. Then I turned, ...
— The Old Stone House and Other Stories • Anna Katharine Green



Words linked to "Carven" :   sculptured, incised, engraved, uncarved, graven, etched, carved, inscribed, lapidarian, sculpted, literature, sliced



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